The prelude

• Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to recognise the two breakaway republics of Ukraine — Donetsk and Luhansk — as independent states, which turned out to be a prelude for Russia’s eventual military operation in the region. 
• In the speech, Mr. Putin blamed Soviet leaders, especially Lenin, the leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, for the disintegration of what he called “historical Russia”. Lenin’s idea of building the country “on the principles of autonomisation” (“the right of self-determination, up to secession”) eventually led to the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), he said.

 How did the USSR fail

• The unravelling of Soviet power began in the late 1980s with protests in the Eastern Bloc as well as in Soviet republics and the Soviet exit from Afghanistan.  
• It started in Poland, which hosted the headquarters of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact security alliance. Protests spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. In June 1989, the anti-communist Solidarity movement, won an overwhelming victory in a partially free election in Poland, leading to the peaceful fall of communist rule. It triggered a chain reaction across the Eastern Bloc. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall that had separated the capitalist West Berlin and the communist east, fell, leading to the German reunification a year later.
• Domestically, the Soviet Union was going through a tough economic phase. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, stated that “an era of stagnation” gripped the country in the mid-1960s.
• Gorbachev introduced economic reforms, such as openness/transparency (glasnost), decentralisation/restructuring (perestroika) and opening up of the economy for foreign trade. The reforms made the nationalists in the Soviet republics (administrative units) stronger, but failed to revitalise the economy.
•  In 1988, Estonia, a republic on the Baltic coast, became the first Soviet administrative unit to declare state sovereignty inside the Union. In March 1990, Lithuania, another Baltic republic, became the first to declare independence from the USSR.  

• After the German reunification, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expanded to East Germany. Crisis was spreading across the Soviet republics and Gorbachev was planning to decentralise much of the central government’s powers to the 15 republics through the New Union Treaty, which was also a bid to renegotiate the original treaty that established the USSR in 1922.
• In August 1991, faced with the crisis in the Union, a group of communist hardliners, including top military and civilian leaders, tried to take power in their hands by ousting Gorbachev in a coup.
• On December 8, 1991, leaders of three Soviet republics—Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich — signed Belavezha Accords, announcing that the USSR no longer existed. They also announced the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that would replace the USSR. 

Post the breakup

• Of the former Soviet republics, nine are members of the CIS — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. And Turkmenistan is an associate member. Russia retains enormous influence in these countries. Russia has also formed a security organisation, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), with former Soviet republics. Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are CSTO members, besides the Russian Federation. 
• Of the 15 republics that became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union, the three Baltic countries — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all sharing borders with Russia — became members of NATO in 2004.
• In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean republic, a Black Sea Peninsula, from Ukraine.
• Recently, Russia recognised two more breakaway republics from Ukraine — Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas region — and sent troops there. Russia also maintains a military presence in Transnistria, a breakaway republic from Moldova, and has dispatched troops to the borders between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, to end a conflict between the two countries over Nagorno Karabakh (Republic of Artsakh), another breakaway republic.

Why Russia Ukraine relationship soured 

• After it became independent in 1991, Ukraine largely adopted a neutral foreign policy. It was one of the founding members of the CIS, but did not join the CSTO, the security organisation.
• But the NATO offer of membership in 2008 started changing equations between Moscow and Kyiv.
• After the regime of a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine was brought down in the 2014 Euromaidan protests and a pro-West government was established in Ukraine, relations turned hostile.
• Russia moved swiftly to take Crimea, which also hosts Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and started supporting separatist rebels in Donbass. Ukraine later exited the CIS and wrote its desire to join NATO into its Constitution. These developments pulled the countries apart, setting the stage for permanent hostility, which led to the current conflict.

Why in News:

• Russia has sent its army into Ukraine

Reference:

1. https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/explained-why-did-vladimir-putin-bring-up-the-disintegration-of-the-ussr-prior-to-declaring-war-on-ukraine/article65086877.ece